‘Weathering the Storm: A Tale of Timing, Loss and Learning’
For two years I had focused on studying the lived experience of one environmental extreme—drought; then I wandered into the aftermath of Cyclone Larry, a climatic force altogether more immediate in the wounding. But there can be serendipity in the reawakening from a bewilderment of loss. In this paper, I recount how an unforeseen experience led to delay in research—but this allowed me to witness, unexpectedly, a momentous shift in public ideas on Australian climate.
‘The Flipside of Serendipity: Human Genetics Rediscovers Race’,
In this paper I investigate the recent re-emergence of race in human genetics and pose the question: was it happenstance or opportune timing? I conclude that, at the turn of the millennium, the time was seemingly ripe for the simmering issue of genetic race to boil over into the scientific mainstream. Further, I argue that it is always important to consider the broader social, political, economic and technological forces that lie behind scientific discoveries. In the case of race it is especially important, given the complexity and sensitivity of the issues involved.
Back to Traffic 9 page >‘The Puzzles of White Australia’
This article relates the story of how a chance encounter with a bizarre relic of the White Australia era—a children’s board game, ‘The White Australia Game’—spurred my curiosity about the meaning of whiteness. The article asks: in the development of Australian immigration policy during the first four decades of the twentieth century, was whiteness simply equated with Europeanness? It makes two arguments that complicate our understanding of the meaning of whiteness in this period. First, immigration policymakers conceived of whiteness as a racial category that contained an internal hierarchy which was organised in both racial and national terms. Second, transnational conversations, ideas and exchanges shaped the meaning of whiteness for Australian policy makers. The article draws on archival material regarding the Australian government’s policy response to continental European migrants during the 1920s, and particularly draws on a case study regarding the Australian Government’s interest in the American restrictive policies regarding European migrants during this period.
‘The ‘Evolution’ of a PhD project – From Jumping Genes to Biochemical Pathways’
In this essay, I describe how my PhD project ‘evolved’ from the study of jumping genes and regulation of a single gene, Cyp6g1, to the expressional characterisation of the entire family of genes of which Cyp6g1 is a member. Furthermore, I describe how an early single control experiment led to the identification of an elusive gene in a biochemical pathway for the synthesis of juvenile hormone, a key hormone in insect development.
‘Transitory Ghosts and Angels in the Photography of Francesca Woodman'
In 2003 I was lucky enough to attend an exhibition of Francesca Woodman’s photography from the late 1970s. I believe it was an occurrence of serendipity that I came to enter Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery and subsequently came to write about Woodman for my thesis. I ran into an old dear friend from Melbourne at the Edinburgh Spiegeltent one night and she described an exhibition so evocatively that I knew instantly it must have been Woodman’s. She told me where the gallery was and I went the next day, where the experience of viewing Woodman’s beautiful, agonised images would stay with me till now. This paper attests that Woodman uses her own body as subject/object to create a sense of fleeting (or serendipitous) femininity that passes between the polarities of presence/absence, woman/environment, pain/hope and human/corpse, forming a feminist identity that is strategically ‘in-between’ and transient.
‘Oscar Wilde: A Celebrity in the Making’
Oscar Wilde has received much biographical attention, both popular and scholarly, since his death in 1900. With such interest in the figure of Oscar, one’s initial feeling might be that all sources available concerning Wilde had surely been located and ‘exhausted’. During the past two years, however, new source material has entered the public domain from a private collection. This source has provided my thesis with a new insight into Oscar Wilde and his lecture tour of America in 1882. The nineteenth-century scrapbook bequeathed to the British Library in 2005 casts the most significant new light on the early career of Oscar Wilde. The volume of advertising materials, newspaper and magazine clippings compiled by Wilde’s American tour manager, Colonel W F Morse, contains material which presents a career in the making and a very conscious construction of a modern celebrity. Having only recently emerged from conservation in the British Library, this archive has previously been used by only select scholars at the invitation of the owner. The housing of the manuscript at the British Library proved serendipitous for my doctoral research.
‘A Generic Proposal’
A playful attempt to formulate a theory regarding how the use, misuse and abuse of aspects of genre fiction may found a proper understanding of and response to the current (arguably dire) state of literary publishing in Australia. Innovatively re-reinterpreting established ideas about genre to suggest that literary fiction, in practice (how it’s manufactured and marketed by publishers; how it’s displayed and categorised in bookstores), might be a ‘kind’ of novel and that this realisation may be of practical benefit if we are to effectively address what has been identified by Mark Davis as ‘the decline of the literary paradigm’.
‘Marvin Gaye, MLK and the FBI’
This article is based on two theses that focused on the American civil rights movement. The first section of this article details how the Motown Record Company was linked to the movement and how it reflected the philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. The second part examines how King was placed under surveillance by the FBI, which suspected him of being under communist influence. The two parts of this article were linked by a common serendipitous moment.
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